With a lot of the fallout from the removal of addons, and the need to bake certain features into the game to level the playing field being a big focus right now, I wanted to talk about communication in the game and how to pick up where the lack of addons will leave off and what blizzards can potentially do to help.
If you are trying to increase communication for players in lieu of addons and auras talking to each other on the players behalf, then the next logical step (especially if trying to bake everything into the game) would be to redo in-game voice comms and improve how they function entirely.
Currently added in live is a new “Recent Allies” addition to the game to help connect with other players (there are pros and cons to the current design but this will not be about that). This does however show me that they know there are things they can and must do to increase player interaction and foster a sense of team play and the fact they are adding things like this means they know it as well.
My solution is a pretty simple and modern change. Just redesign the in-game voice comms to function similar to that of Fortnite, Call of Duty, VR chat, Roblox, Battlefield, or something of the sort as the best way to go about it.
Now as for how to change the functionality, well that could be something like default Auto-on Proximity voice, or Auto-on Party/Instance/Raid voice comms, all with the same mutes/ignore/report/volume sliders and voice activity or push to talk keybind options as most modern games (console or otherwise) that also have them baked in as well for team play and quick communication without addons needing to talk for them.
As a deaf player, I really don’t want to see this happen because right now going in voice for wow is opt in instead of opt out. I want to keep playing a game I enjoy that’s accessible to me.
I do agree that there needs be improved communication options but I don’t think proximity & group voice chat is the answer to it.
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I understand your concerns with having more of a interaction over voice comms as a deaf player. I’m glad you brought these things up, and perhaps we can discover a solution they can use together. I’d love your feedback and suggestions.
Some positive news though is I’ve also heard they may be working on improvements to the current text-to-speech/speech-to-text for the chat/comms to help with accessibility as well, so perhaps it would be entirely possible in the future to have things essentially transcribed to players should they choose the option.
So you can type in chat and text to speech will play that for others and eventually with improvements, speech to text will convert what they say to text chat for you to read.
Every single major team play game of modern times has shown and proven that the proximity and/or grouped voice chat is the best way to connect. Best part is not everyone has to use voice and can still use text chat so being on but optional gives people the freedom to choose to use it or disable it and keep doing things their old way.
They can communicate very quickly, voice active or 1 button to quickly press to do so, without needing addons to talk for them during their encounters.
I don’t think this game can have that kind of teamplay without that kind of communication, which already happens outside of the game and they know it, they have a section when you list something in group finder asking what voice program for chat you use lol. Everyone’s guild basically has a discord.
They’ve had voice baked into the game for longer than discord has been a thing, they just need to properly utilize it like every other team play game now in my opinion.